While agriculture and farming was at one time a very traditional way of life for many people around the world, the desire for higher output and efficiency has forced the industry to become highly mechanized. Todays farmers use a complex array of implements and machinery to maintain their farms and process their crops. As the complexity and specialty of this farming machinery increased, so has the cost of such machinery.
This increased cost has resulted in problems for many smaller U.S. farmers and farmers in developing countries. Quite often, today's farm equipment is so specialized that it can perform only one or possibly two functions. This situation mandates that farmers, in order to maintain competitiveness, buy multiple pieces of equipment to accomplish all the tasks associated with running a farm. As would be expected, this requires the farmer to go deeply in debt, which often results in farmers overextending themselves and going bankrupt. In response to the need by smaller farmers for a multi-purpose agricultural vehicle, several companies have started to manufacture multi-purpose vehicles which combine the features of a dump truck and a tractor. One such vehicle is disclosed in U.S. Design patent application 29/050,237 now U.S. Pat. No. D386,769. These vehicles usually incorporate a tilting dump body, but generally do not have a three point hitch assembly which can be attached to standard plowing, seeding, and other implements. On the other hand, the three point hitch assemblies traditionally incorporated into standard farm tractors are large, complex, specially- manufactured devices which include numerous hydraulic lines, control valves and mechanical linkages. Such three point hitch assemblies are generally not removable from the vehicles upon which they are mounted. In addition, if a three point hitch assembly is needed on the front as well as on the rear of the vehicle, a second hitch assembly would have to be purchased and permanently attached to the other end of the vehicle.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,647,441 discloses a self-contained three point hitch adapted to be attached to the rear of a vehicle and which could be attached to the front of the vehicle with some modification to the hitch and the vehicle. Still, no art that we know of specifically discloses a self contained three point hitch easily mounted on either the front or the rear of a vehicle.